The default setting is still a choice. We often don't do something different out of the fear of making a change, but doing the same thing you did last year is still a choice - it just doesn't require any intention.

The default option is the no-fault option. Nobody - not your banker, not your neighbors, not your partner, not yourself - will fault you for staying on the established path. We endure marginal profits, unsatisfying relationships, sub-optimal yields, dysfunctional organizational structures, and marginal results year after year not because empirical evidence says we should, but because it's safe.

The lack of a decision is still a decision, it's just not a conscious choice.

If you aren't getting the results you want, it's time to start looking at what could be different. Because the default setting doesn't seem to be getting you there.

When a ship maintains a heading, it's rarely on course - almost always, it's just slightly off, and the helmsman makes a small correction, then goes off course again and makes another small correction. But a good helmsman gets the ship to port through the course of these small adjustments.

The only time you need to make a big correction is when you're way off course. But a good helmsman doesn't let that happen.

That means you've got to pay attention, even when it's not much fun. You monitor if things are heading in the right direciton. Catching budgets, crops, and employees when they've gotten a little off course is a lot easier than trying to spin that wheel round and round to make a major correction. Even if the ocean is boring - I've been there, and sometimes there's nothing but horizon and flat water as far as you can see - you've got to keep your hand on the wheel, and you have to keep steering the ship.

I can describe to you what it feels like when you jump into the pool, and I can tell you how to move your arms and legs - but until you actually get in the water, you're never going to feel it and you're never going to really know what it is that I am talking about.

It's all too easy to forget this when working with employees. You can spend all the time you want telling prospective employees how hard it's going to be, how hot and how muddy and how intense, but until they actually get to your farm and start working, they won't really know.

The same is true for documenting procedures. You can spend all winter writing about how to drive a tractor or making videos of how to put a twist tie on kale, and that's tremendously useful, but in the end, the person who's going to do it has to get on the tractor and go. You can read tips and tricks for driving straight, but you still have to do the work of driving straight to really learn it.

At the same time, you can capture some important information this way. There's nothing worse that trying to figure out how to do something this year that you know went right last year! And documenting procedures lets the lowest-possible skilled person do the work. You're not going to hire a packing house manager with no experience, hand them a manual, and expect them to succeed; but you can hand that same document to somebody with experience and expect them to understand how the processes work on your farm, and what the end product should look like.

So, yes, write it down. Describe the wetness of the water and the angle of your arms as well as you can, but remember that your people will still have to swim before they really understand.

You know that guy at farmer's market who sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck, looking down at the ground with his arms crossed? How much effort are you going to put into going up to him and buying his vegetables?

Nobody's obligated to buy from you. Wal-Mart has organic and local produce now. Yes, you work hard. Yes, you take good care of the earth. Yes, you suffer through droughts and floods and plagues of locusts, but that just doesn't matter. Your competition isn't asking for a break, and that means your customers aren't going to give you one.

I try to patronize local businesses, but I'm often greeted with an attitude that makes me wonder why anybody would shop there - the appliance store that charges an extra trip charge because their repair guy didn't bring the right parts, the clothing store staffed by young women who can't be bothered to talk to me, the Mexican restaurant that can't be bothered to bring a margarita in under fifteen minutes. These people are coasting, and coasting doesn't work forever (even if you keep going downhill, you eventually run into the ocean).

The small farmer needs products that have real value. Local and organic don't make up for salad greens that go bad in just a few days, dirty carrots, or bruised tomatoes. If you aren't providing fresh, flavorful, beautiful vegetables that actually last in the customer's refrigerator, you're coasting. And when things get tough - when produce departments change hands, or wallets tighten in a downturn - the customer is going to pick a produce supplier who's pedaling. And if not that, they'll just pick somebody cheaper.

There comes a point in the growth of any business where working harder doesn't get you significantly more results.

When you start out as a farmer (or any entrepeneur) on a few acres or with a few hundred chickens, you can rely on hard work to get you by. The tractor breaks? I'll use the rototiller. The beans are weedy? I'll just take longer to pick them. Behind on the bookkeeping? I'll stay up late and get it done.

Unfortunately, this works. It works so well that a lot of farmers work themselves right into a successful operation based primarily on their ability - and sometimes the ability of a loyal crew - to just work harder. For a farm where a significant portion of the labor comes from the farmer, increasing the number of hours you work, or ramping up the intensity, makes a big difference. You plant more acres, pack more boxes, sell more at farmers market, piecing together equipment, working late, and figuring it all out until suddenly it stops working.

On a few acres, labor-saving implements just save labor: if you miss a timely weeding because the hydraulics go out on your cultivating tractor, you can put a couple of enthusiastic workers out on hoes for a day or two and clean up a lot of weeds. On twenty acres, not so much. And at some point, depending on your location, coming up with more people on short notice simply becomes impossible.

And on a farm with ten full-time employees, adding another day to the farmer's workload just doesn't make much of a difference in the overall output of the farm.

I've heard beginning farmers say, "We're so small that efficiency doesn't matter." But that's completely backwards. When you're small is the time to figure out how to make the most of your time, to set up the patterns of work that make certain the tractor has been maintained so it isn't going to break, to document procedures and communicate expectations so that you can attend to urgencies and emergencies while knowing that the work is proceeding and proceeding well, to put systems and processes in place that are transparent and linear.

If you don't do it when you're small, you'll have to do it when you're big (and if you aren't going to get bigger, this still applies - working harder is a lot easier at 30 than it is at 40!). And it's a lot easier to do it up front.

We used to have a problem with counting. Every week, the harvest and packing logs would say that we had 180 bunches of Swiss chard, but we'd have 178. Either way, each week the CSA line would grind to a halt, and we would scurry around to harvest a couple of additional bunches, which wouldn't get properly washed and chilled before we packed them into the remaining CSA boxes.

Or we'd have 210, meaning that 30 got composted because they didn't have a home.

I tried emphasizing that getting the count right mattered. I talked about quality. I talked about 30 composted bunches represented wasted money and wasted resources. I explained how it held up the CSA line. I pleaded. And nothing worked.

Finally, I added a new column to the harvest and packing logs where the person responsible for the count and the quality wrote his or her initials. I was certain that this would provide me with the tools I needed to find the responsible people and take corrective - or even disciplinary! - action. I had every expectation that I would soon have the opportunity to open a big ol' can of whoop-ass and solve this problem.

But that didn't happen. Instead, suddenly, every count was right. It didn't just improve, it changed completely. We went from regularly mis-counting items to nailing the count time after time.

As a result, I implemented this accountability all over the farm, anywhere we were keeping records or requiring tasks to be done. Pallet stacking sheets, closing checklists, tractor work directives, and bathroom cleaning logs all came with a place for the responsible worker to make his or her mark.

A recent article in the New York Times shared the results of a study that monitored restaurant employee behavior for signs of theft. The surveillance did cut down on theft, but it also had the surprising side effect of encouraging employees to do the right thing: savings from theft were modest, but after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of 7 percent. Workers pulled back on unethical practices, but they also put more efforts into things like prompting customers to have dessert or a second beer. No whoop-ass necessary.

Monitoring employee performance, whether actively by tracking productivity or passively by requiring accountability, changes behavior. The same people making mistakes, moving slowly, or simply not making the effort to do their job well can be set up to succeed. And that's a win for everyone.

Here in the Upper Midwest, we still have time to check over our equipment one last time before we get into the field. Actually, if this weather keeps up, we’ll have time to check over it a few more times before we get into the field – which makes it all the more important that everything is in tip-top shape and ready to go. Late springs mean that everything has to happen that much faster, and with that much less margin for error.

I’m always surprised at how much equipment that’s bolted together tends to shift over the course of the season. I’m sure that there are some farmers who don’t have problems with this, but I've always struggled with it. Maybe our bumpy field entrances shake things loose, or maybe I’m just not very good at turning a wrench.

Lots of my equipment at Rock Spring Farm has the three point hitch A-frame bolted to the toolbar that holds the seeders, transplanting units, or other working elements. I was preparing a seeder for sale the other day and noticed that the A-frame for the three point hitch was more than three inches off center. I don't think this is the result of freezing and  thawing over the winter, so this spacing discrepancy means that everything we seeded with that seeder last year - or at least the last time we had it out - was three inches off of the center of the bed.

Of course, if you do any kind of mechanical cultivating, this is a huge problem. One pair of outside rows is six inches closer to each other than they should be, so you’re likely to be throwing dirt on the first row of the next bed with your track sweeps; and on the other side, the pair of outside rows is too far apart, and you’re likely to be missing a strip of weeds down the middle of the wheel track – and that translates into either hand weeding or weed seeds, neither of which we really want more of in our world.

I've seen the same thing happen to cultivating equipment. My Buddingh basket weeder especially has a tendency to drift.

When bolting equipment onto a diamond or a square tool bar, you’ll get the sturdiest mount if you ensure that the faces of the clamps are all equally flat on the toolbar. Tighten one bolt a little, then the next. Taking your time with the initial setup will save time and headaches over the course of the season.

Take the time now to check over the spacing on your equipment, and add it to the list of things you check each time you take it out to the field, at least visually if not with a tape measure.

The proposed Produce Rule for the Food Safety Modernization Act seems to be circling around out there, creating a lot of concern for some folks and not getting much notice from anybody else.

Despite the exemptions contained in the Tester-Hagen amendment to the legislation passed by Congress in 2010, many operations large and small are going to fall under the legal oversight of the Produce Rule or the Preventive Controls Rule.

Exemptions to the rule are based on a number of factors, including total food sales, the production of certain crops (including rutabagas), the kinds of customers you sell your produce to, and where those customers are located. The Produce Safety Alliance put together a one-page decision tree for determining an whether an individual operation will be exempt from the Produce Rule – you can link to that document here.

Do take note that just because an operation is “exempt” from the Produce Rule does not exempt that operation from meeting minimum federal requirements. You still can’t sell adulterated foods, and exemptions can be withdrawn if your farm products are linked to a food contamination outbreak.

In addition, if your operation buys in produce, you could fall under an additional set of regulations, the Preventive Controls Rule, with its own set of exemptions and timelines for compliance.

While the rule is still in the “proposed” phase, 2013 is not too soon to start working towards compliance. This doesn’t mean that you have to get all the way there in just once year, but it does take time to assemble and implement a food safety plan for a fresh market vegetable operation. At a minimum, developing an awareness of food-safety best practices this growing season will help even if you do the heavy lifting of operational changes in the winter.

In my experience and observations, most vegetable growers base their row spacing on two factors:

• Center-to-center wheel spacing on their tractors; and
• Whether they are using a raised bed or flat bed system.

At Rock Spring Farm, we have a 60 inches center-to-center wheel spacing on all of our tractors. The Allis Chalmers G can be set to this width. This also means that most of our equipment also fits on, or is modular to, this spacing: our rototiller is 60 inches (which is a little too narrow), our tine weeder is 60 inches, and our drill is ten feet.

We've used a number of different row spacings in our thirteen years. We started off with the Eliot Coleman-recommended 3 12-inch or 2 24-inch rows. An equipment purchase the next year led us to work on 4 10-inch rows, which left the outer rows 30 inches apart. With this setup, we experienced quite a bit of disease pressure, and mechanical cultivation with anything other than a basket weeder was very difficult.

In 2005, we changed over to a system of 3 15-inch rows, and we have stayed with that ever since. This spacing has definitely improved our disease control by improving air flow, and it has made mechanical weed control much easier. We use our Buddingh basket weeder to cultivate either all three rows, or with an added sweep (purchased from Buddingh) to clean the middle row when we have crops on two rows.

When we stopped using soil blocks in 2009, we purchased a 2-row mechanical transplanter to replace our water wheel planter for every-day use. The new transplanter only plants two rows, so on transplanted crops we tightened up our in-row spacing by about 30% to maximize our productivity. Anne and Eric Nordell have done some in-depth analyses about planting more densely in the row to account for the wide-row spacings they used on their farm. The wider row spacing allows us to back the crops more densely in the row because we have plenty of air circulation; and the plant roots still have plenty of soil to scavenge in. See the illustrations in this online book to see how wide vegetable root systems are: http://goo.gl/S3kMF.

If I had it all to do over again, I would use a 72-inch tire spacing, and set my rows at 18 inches. My 30-inch 2-row spacing right now is too narrow to effectively hill potatoes. Further, my experience leads me to feel that the more dirt I can move, the more potential I have for effective weed mechanical weed control, and since that's such a key factor for yield, speed of harvest, and labor expenditures, it feels like the most critical thing to build an organic vegetable farming system around. However, the wheels on many older cultivating tractors won't adjust that wide without special spacers, which are available but which come with an additional hassle-factor.

On March 14, I’ll be presenting a workshop on employee management for the Practical Farmers of Iowa. And while good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches, the legal side of farm employment is almost guaranteed to lead to headaches, especially for market farmers.

Because it requires large injections of seasonally-intense labor, as well as having a legitimate reason to offer employees housing, farm work is often subject to slightly modified set of labor laws and regulations. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find concise answers in one place to all of the questions these exceptions raise. And for market farmers, the issues get even more complicated because many of the activities we engage in – such as cleaning, packaging, selling, and delivering produce – don’t fall under the traditional (and legal) definition of farm work.

Practical Farmers of Iowa, working with the nonprofit law center Farm Commons, has created a Farm Employment FAQ, with answers to many of these difficult questions for Iowa farmers, available here.

Farmers’ Legal Action Group has created a printable guide for Minnesota farmers, available here.

Kudos to both of these organizations for creating accessible information for this critical and often misunderstood area of farm management.

If you know of similar resources for other states, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Sales without profit is just work. - Will Oberton

A farming client brought Fastenal's Will Oberton in for a short part of a leadership team meeting yesterday, and Will dropped this little gem. It's all too easy to forget in the rush to secure market share, sell out of carrots, and be the biggest player on the block.